Structural health monitoring (SHM) of safety critical components is used to facilitate life-cycle management decisions. As design and functionality requirements of engineering structures become more complex, SHM and damage assessment is becoming a rigorous obligation. As one example, the aerospace industry has one of the highest returns for SHM since damage can lead to catastrophic and expensive failures, which in turn causes aircraft vehicles to undergo regular costly inspections. Roughly, one-third of an aircraft's life-cycle cost can be spent on inspection and repair, a figure that excludes any additional opportunity cost associated with the time the aircraft is grounded for inspection and/or repair. Many advances in SHM concentrate on modern, non-destructive inspection devices that provide off-line inspection capabilities requiring structures to be taken out of service for critical inspection. It is, therefore, desirable that damage detection in critical structures be swift, reliable, and cost-effective.
Thus, there exists a need for systems, methods, and apparatus providing structural monitoring.